


Monsters

by rivendellrose



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Death, F/M, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-07
Updated: 2012-10-07
Packaged: 2017-11-15 20:36:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/531429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rivendellrose/pseuds/rivendellrose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-series. Kara can't seem to get away from death. Or from Leoben.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Monsters

It should have been a good life, if you could call it life. Wander the earth, spirit and fire, nothing to her anymore but a whisper and a memory. What had Gaius called her, an angel? Something like that. Kara Thrace preferred to think of herself more as a spirit. If nothing else, she didn’t feel particularly damned angelic, judging by the glowing terms in which Baltar’s old followers spoke of those beings. They sounded an awful lot, Kara thought, like minor gods to the Zeus of their one-god pantheon, but she tried to be beyond that nowadays. If nothing else, it didn’t matter a whole hell of a lot anymore.

Most of her friends were gone, now, and she was starting to wonder when she’d go, too. How long she’d linger, how long wander as a spirit in this new world, like Echo without her body. She could appear when she wanted to - not often, and not to many, because most wouldn’t notice her, wouldn’t look hard enough to see. She’d visited Lee a few times before he died (alone in the wilderness, out on some stupid adventure that it had never occurred to him might require equipment and supplies he no longer had access to), and for a long time after that she’d stayed back at the main camp, watching Hera and Kacey and the other kids grow up. She hadn’t been back in a while - Helo’d died of some stupid virus two springs ago, and ever since then she’d had the uncomfortable feeling that Hera and Athena could see her, and that they blamed her for not being able to help her old friend in the end.

She’d looked for them - Helo and Lee, both - for a while. Nothing. Apparently only _certain_ people got stuck as shades on this planet, and they weren’t... what, tormented enough? Cursed? Whatever. They were gone, and she hoped they’d crossed the river and found the halls of the dead open to them. She liked that thought, the two of them hanging out with all the other friends they’d lost along the way. Maybe in the afterlife, without her around, Sam and Lee and even Dee could get on okay together.

Between Caprica and the other colonies, the Olympic Carrier and all the rest of the disasters in the fleet, and everything that went wrong during the escape from New Caprica, the mutiny on-board Galactica... she’d seen enough death for a thousand lifetimes. She was ready to be done with it. But death wasn’t ready to be done with her. Every day another stupid accident among the colonists from the fleet, every year another disease that threatened to wipe them all off the face of this new Earth. She was tired of it. So she left the colony and its people behind and wandered in the wilderneness, but even there, somehow, it managed to find her with a face she knew.

Kara found the Leoben one day in the late autumn, half-dead on a hillside with his blood soaking into the dirt and grass around him. There was no sane way, at first, to be sure that it was him - _him_ , the one she’d known and hated back on New Caprica. She’d long since given up telling the difference between most of the Cylons that were still around. Even the Sharon they’d all known and trusted as Athena looked just like every other model Eight to her. On a good day, Kara could distinguish between a few of the Sixes by the way they dressed, the way they did their hair, the way one might carry herself differently from the rest, but the Leobens? Never. They were all the same man to her, even if they looked at her with not even a spark of recognition in their eyes. But, whoever he was - whichever - he was dying. He was too far from the camps for anyone else to find him before it was long past too late, and too far gone for her to carry him back before he’d bled his last out onto her shoulder. 

Well, that was his frakking problem. She thinking of leaving, turning her mind to some other place, _any_ other place, when he stirred and opened his eyes a little, reached out a weak, shaking hand toward her.

“Kara,” he murmured.

“Oh, for frak’s sake. It _is_ you, isn’t it?” She bent and looked into the glassy, pain-dulled eyes of the madman who’d imprisoned her all those years ago. The one who’d humiliated her and cut her meat for her and kidnapped a little girl so he could trick her into thinking she had a daughter by him. “You’re the one. You stupid frakking toaster. You planned this, didn’t you? Set yourself down where you knew I’d be. You and your damned prophecies.”

Guts spilled all over the grassland, he was too weak to shrug, though she saw a muscle in his shoulder twitch with trying. Instead, he just smiled at her. Blood colored his teeth. She sighed.

“Stupid frakkin’ toaster,” she repeated, and sat down on the grass next to him. “I ought to end you, one last time.”

“Be... my guest.” His voice sounded bubbly, like there was already a bit of blood in his lungs. That had to hurt, but he was still grinning like the lunatic he was. 

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” She snorted. “Make it nice and easy. Well, I don’t have a gun or a knife, so you’ll just have to frakkin’ wait.”

But she stayed. She couldn’t explain why. She’d watched him die before - hell, she’d shoved a knife in his guts or through his carotid artery herself more than once - but she’d prayed for him, too, once, and this time seemed different. He wasn’t holding her captive, here. He wasn’t some kind of bogeyman. He was just a man, tired and worn out, with blood trickling down his chin and seeping out into the ground, and she’d seen too many men die to not feel instinctively that they shouldn’t do it alone. Not even Cylons. Because, of course, there wasn’t much of a line left, anymore, was there? Frakking Tigh was a frakking Cylon, for the love of all the gods, and as much as she’d always hated him, he’d always been _Human_ in all his many faults. And Sam had been one, too, and Sam had been the best of all that Humanity’d had to offer. Even put up with her, frakking shit-ass nightmare of a wife that she’d been, and that had to pretty much deify the poor bastard, didn’t it, if patience and goodness were the qualifications for godhood? So here was another, and he was dying, the same as Sam had been on that awful day back on Galactica, and she couldn’t make herself turn her back on him. So she sat on the grass next to him, and told herself she’d just wait, quietly, until it was over.

But he had to go and ruin it, of course. The bastard never had known when to quit. He stretched out his hand to her. “Kara... Pray with me?”

“No.”

“Why?” 

“I can’t.”

He tried to laugh, and more blood bubbled out onto his chin. “Yes, you can.”

“I don’t want to talk to your god,” she snapped. 

“Not mine. Yours. You...” he coughed. “You talk to yours, and me to mine. Deal?”

The hand he held out to her was callused and rough, with dirt gritted in under his fingernails. When she took it, she remembered the hospital back on New Caprica, and Kacey, and her blood seeping into the flagstones at the bottom of the stairs in the replica of her own apartment on the real Caprica. “Why the hell did you do it?” she asked. “Why? Why the act, why lie to me, why kidnap Kacey? Did you really think it would make me love you somehow?”

“I saw--” he began.

“Yeah, I know, my frakkin’ destiny.”

“Us,” he corrected, his eyes weirdly stern. “You, me. Cylons, Humans. Earth. All down to you. All... but you had to trust me, first. So I could... point you in the right direction.”

“So you thought you’d _lie_ to me. Great frakking idea, you stupid toaster.”

“I wanted things... faster.” Even in pain, his lip turned up in a smile both wry and rueful. “Caprica and Sharon wanted Humans and Cylons to live together. Their idea. They wanted to help. I... just wanted you. Thought if we were there, alone, no... distractions, if you saw me with Kacey...”

“So you stole her from her mother, lied to me, and told me you’d fertilized one of my eggs in a test tube to make her. Gods, what a romantic.” Kara spat on the ground. “And let’s not forget keeping me in a prison for a year. Three rooms--”

“Four.”

“Of course, the bedroom.” She flailed her arms wide, announcing it to the whole universe. “ _My_ frakking bedroom, exactly like the one on Caprica. I would never have set foot in it willingly, not if you kept me there the rest of my frakking life, not it was the last room in the world. I’d rather have slept on the staircase. But no, you really thought that was going to get you somewhere, didn’t you? You really thought that I’d thank you for it all. ‘Gee, thanks for locking me in a cage, away from my husband, making me play house with you for a frakking year.’ You thought I was stupid enough to just get confused one day, get so desperate to be touched that I’d crawl between the sheets with a monster. Gods, this is frakking pointless.” 

Kara started to stand up, but Leoben wouldn’t let go of her hand. She tugged and then, feeling a rush of adrenaline laced with panic, wrenched her hand back, but he held on still - his fingers only clenched tighter, and his half-broken body lurched, dragged across the grass toward her, stretched out like a broken doll, except that his eyes wouldn’t leave hers. 

“Let go! Frak! What the frak do you want from me?”

“I told you, Kara,” he said, slowly and distinctly to make himself heard through the blood in his mouth and throat; “I want you to pray with me.”

“Frak you!”

A gargled sound - a laugh, she realized with rising horror - bubbled out of Leoben’s chest. “Too late,” he told her.

She tried to kick him - something she would have felt guilty about at another time, kicking a dying man, but the part of her that thought and reasoned was far gone at that moment, leaving only the parts that feared and raged and reacted. But the ground beneath them was wet with his blood, and her boot slipped out from under her, toppling her to the ground next to him in the mud. Mud and blood all over her, a genocidal frakwad of a toaster clinging to her hand. He still wouldn’t let go of her gods-damned hand.

“You want me to pray with you?” she shouted. “Fine! I pray to Hades he spits you back out of His kingdom, that’s what I pray! I pray you wander the universe as a starving shade. Hungry forever, with no family or friends to feed your spirit with sacrifices. Thirsty forever, with no waters of Lethe to make you forget. That’s my prayer for you, you frakking bastard.”

He smiled and squeezed her fingers. “That’s... very sweet, actually, Kara. Eternity together. Might not be so bad.”

And of course that _was_ what that would mean, wasn’t it? She’d realized even as she’d spoke the words, with a sinking familiarity that made her wonder if it was her own blood that ran cold on the ground, but she’d hoped he wouldn’t notice. 

“Frak you,” Kara repeated, even though the words tasted cold and ashen in her mouth.

“Gave up your chance...”

“I’d kick you again if I could get up.”

“Big threats. You’ve gone soft, Kara Thrace.”

“Yeah, well. Turns out, it’s just not that fun kicking appliances when they’re already broken.”

He smiled again, then coughed up blood and fell back against her shoulder, his whole body shaking. Too tired and horrified to fight, Kara lay there in the mud, and tried not to think about the life that was oozing out of him.

Just like the monsters in stories, he died at dawn, just as the sun crept over the faint, misty horizon. It would have felt more satisfying if he hadn’t hauled himself upright with the last of his strength so that he could watch the brilliant red orb climb over the dark edge of the world. It would have bothered Kara less if he hadn’t turned to her, and sighed out his last breath like words of love. She would have felt less compelled to close his eyes if they hadn’t stayed locked on hers even as they stilled and the light of life faded from them.

_Frakkin’ toasters. They don’t even have the decency to stay monsters._


End file.
